Head of the Egyptian Forensic Department Hisham Abdel Hamid denied Wednesday recent media news quoted him saying that slain Italian student Giulio Regeni had been tortured for seven days, Al Masry Al Youm reported.
On Tuesday, Reuters quoted two prosecution sources saying that Abdel Hamid, reportedly conducted autopsy on Regeni’s corpse, was questioned as an expert by officials in the public prosecutor’s office last week. The sources told Reuters that Abdel Hamid told the prosecution that Regeni “was interrogated for up to seven days before he was killed.”
Abdel Hamid confirmed to Al Masry Al Youm newspaper Wednesday that he has not been summoned or questioned by the Egyptian prosecution and that he has made no statements on how the crime occurred.
“This news is completely untrue and fabricated as a whole,” said Abdel Hamid, calling on the media to exercise caution in dealing with news relating to forensics.
According to Reuters, an investigator in the prosecutor’s office said that “Abdel Hamid said during the questioning that the wounds on the body occurred over different intervals of between 10-14 hours.”
Shaaban Al Shamy, forensic medicine aide to the Egyptian justice minister also denied the news describing it as “misleading and devoid of all foundation,” according to Youm7.
Al Shamy vowed the ministry will take legal action against those publishing “news that comes from sources who want to distort reality for political goals and which has nothing to do with the reality”.
The dead body of the Italian Cambridge doctoral student was found in Cairo Alexandria desert road on Feb. 3 with signs of torture, including cigarette burns on his body.
